One of the most serious errors made by atheists, agnostics, deists, fundamentalists,
and mainline religious groups is the error of attempting to explain something
God does in human terms. Those who attack the existence of God and those
who worship God both have a tendency to do this. Many times the arguments
going on are totally caused because both sides are constructing arguments
that are rooted in words and concepts that are human when the subject of
the discussion is completely nonhuman or nonphysical. What we hope to do
in this article is to give some examples of areas where this happens and
hopefully provide some clarification of issues in the process.

There is a tendency among all those (including your author) to think of creation
as an act at a particular place in space. When concepts like the big bang
are discussed, many of us conceive of the process as a massive explosion occurring
in space with the fragments flying out like shrapnel sailing away from the
explosion of a bomb. This is not what is indicated either from a biblical
standpoint nor from a scientific standpoint. When the Bible says that God
created the cosmos and the earth, the word used for created
is a Hebrew word that is never used in reference to something a human can
do, and it is also never used in conjunction with existing material
. The indication is that the process is unique to God, and no human or physical
involvement is participating. The Bible tells us over and over again that
God is outside of time and space, and descriptions of the processing of celestial
bodies involve the "stretching out" of space (
Job 9:8
; Psalm 104:2
; Isaiah 40:22
; 42:5
; Jeremiah 10:12
; 51:15
; Zechariah 12:1
). It is also important to notice that biblical descriptions of God's actions
never really give a causal agent to what God does. The whole concept of miracles
is an indication that God can and does function outside of the physical human
world.

Recent studies in cosmology and quantum mechanics support this point.
The most recent studies of the makeup of the cosmos suggest to us that only
4% of the cosmos is made up of ordinary matter; 26% is made up of what is
called exotic dark matter, and 70% of what is called dark energy (see
Scientific American, January, 2001, pages 37-53). The fact that the
cosmos is accelerating has opened a whole new understanding of the subject
of cosmology, but scientists are regularly talking about multi-dimensions
beyond the three-dimensional physical creation that we are familiar with.
Discussions involving the big bang theory or the inflation theory are saying
that space itself as well as time was produced in creation. The assumption
that the big bang was an explosion of something in space is not what is
being proposed. String theory requires 11 spacial dimensions for its proposals
to even be discussed.

Creation is not a picture of an old-man-in-the-sky playing with cosmic
tinker toys. It is an act in which the very fabric of space/time is produced
by something nonhuman and nonphysical, but still within reach in some degree
of the human mind.

Worship and Service to God Are Not

To Satisfy Human Requirements

When we think of worshipping God, we tend to think in many cases that
we are putting on a performance to please God. The atheist will suggest
that a god needing praise and adoration is a deficient being and thus must
be a creation of man. Many religious leaders conduct services as if God
is going to evaluate the quality of what is done, so great emphasis is given
to the quality of singing, praying, preaching, etc. Over the years, there
have been many debates about what should be done in worship and how it should
be done, and the emphasis has often been on what will please God. Let me
state categorically that God does not need our worship, praise, encouragement,
work, prayer, or money. If we understand God as the creator of the cosmos,
and if in any way we comprehend that "in Him we live and move and have our
being," then surely we must understand that God is not dependent on us.
If all Christians on the planet were to stop worshipping God and stop giving
their money, God would not be affected in the slightest. God's work
on this planet would still be done.

The purpose of all of these acts is not to benefit God, but to benefit
man. The person who does not learn to give in a cheerful and willing way
is a doomed person. Their inability will not allow them to know the real
joy of love, family, marriage, sex, friendship, or being part of something
greater than themselves. Learning to give cheerfully and joyfully is the
only cure for selfishness and all the destructiveness it brings.

Worship to God is the same kind of thing. Just as God told us how to
give, He has given us the way worship should be carried on. The adopted
phrase of addictive treatment groups is "learn to look to a higher power."
Worship enables us to have the potential to leave all the cares and frustrations
of life for a while and look to something better and more positive. Rather
than use a drug like alcohol, the worshipper does his or her trip away from
life's hassles in a constructive way that builds and leads to something better.
Worship is not a spectator sport; it is a beneficial tool God has given
us for our benefit. One that can be done by everyone no matter what their
age, physical, or mental condition, body condition, or status in life. We
please God in our worship by our attitude and willingness to allow His spirit
to mold and shape us, not by theatrical accomplishments or sophisticated
displays of our abilities.

Heaven and
Hell Are Not Places

to Satisfy
Human Retribution

It has always been interesting to me to hear an atheist use the phrase
"go to hell" to someone they do not like or have a disagreement with. People
throw phrases around without considering their meanings, and I am sure that
is the case with most profanity. In this case, the phrase would suggest
that the person saying "go to hell" wants punishment to happen to the person
that they are telling it to, but knows it has to be something or someone
greater than they are to do it. Even phrases like "hell on earth" or "his
own personal hell" are expressions of physical oppression and suffering and
do not radiate an understanding of what God is all about.

The Bible goes to great pains to try to convey to us the notion that
hell is not a physical condition. Jesus describes hell as a place reserved
for the devil and his angels (
Matthew 25:41
). The condition of the rich man in
Luke 16
as well as the story of Lazarus is a picture of one isolated from God,
family, love, and peace, and a "great gulf" separates hell from heaven.
All of these pictures which the Bible paints of hell show it to be isolation
from God and everything associated with God. Heaven is shown to us in a
similar way. Through the apocalyptic eyes of John in Revelation, we see
heaven as a place free of all physical sorrow, death, pain, and tears (
Revelation 21:3-4
) because all of these physical things are passed away.

Our willingness and sometimes our desire to assign people to hell or
to heaven is too often simply a case of wanting an appropriate reward or
punishment for what we feel they have done to or for us in this life. God
gives us David as a man who did some awful things physically and reaped the
consequences of much of what he did. God knew David's heart and, in spite
of David's repeated failures and shortcomings, David is held up as a positive
model for us. We do not have the ability to know what is in a person's heart,
so we are told to leave judgment to God (
Matthew 7:1
; Romans 12:19
). Understanding heaven and hell as spiritual places and God as the perfect
judge can relieve us of a lot of grief, anger, and guilt.

God Is Not Just a Smart Super Human

Using Advanced Human Techniques

Someone has coined the phrase "If I can know the mind of God, then God isn't
God." Whoever said that was likely to have been dealing with a problem of
suffering or tragedy. The statement, however, is also true of those of us
dealing with questions of apologetics. When we talk about the creation,
creationists may say "God spoke it into existence." In the minds of many,
sound is the processor. The notion is that somehow God's voice literally
did the creating of the physical cosmos. As a teacher, I might say "pass
your papers in." In a few moments, the papers would be in my "incoming"
tray. Did I speak the papers into existence? In a sense, I did because
my spoken word carried enough authority to get the job done. My voice did
not create the papers, but I did speak them into the tray.

Scientists who subscribe to naturalism and maintain that there is no
god have a similar problem. They assume that the man-made laws, principles,
and theories that govern matter as we see it today are the only factors that
can legitimately be used to explain what we see in the cosmos around us.
Quantum mechanics, relativity, and much of the new cosmology--especially
the acceleration of the cosmos have shown the fallacy of such an approach.

When God says "my ways are not your ways" and "my thoughts are not your
thoughts" (Isaiah
55:8-9
), He is giving us a clue about trying to explain all we see on a human
physical basis and that clue is "don't try to do it."

Someone has said something like "The cosmos is not only stranger than
you can believe; it is also stranger than you can imagine." The methods
of creation God has used are far beyond man's processes, techniques, and
understandings. This does not mean that we should not try to understand
these things; it just means that we should not be arrogant enough either
scientifically or theologically to believe that the methods of creation are
going to be those that we know and understand. Isaac Newton said it well
when he described his monumental discoveries as having now and then discovered
a pebble or a pretty stone while a whole ocean of truth lay before him.

Discussions about the age of things seem to be a major issue for many
people on all sides of the evolution/creation controversy. People also
want God to solve problems for them in a time frame that suits them. We
tend to want immediate retribution to those who mistreat us, eternal life
in our physical bodies, instant relief from physical pain and infirmities,
and natural conditions to fit our needs.

The fact of the matter is that God created time and is in control of
it. There are numerous passages in the Bible that tell us this--
Ecclesiastes 3:1-11
; Acts 1:7
; and 2 Peter 3:8
. Man fails to understand that God functions outside of time and is not
restricted by time. This means that God sees time as we look at a wall--able
to see all points of time as "now." Someone has said that time is God's way
of keeping everything from happening at once, and there is great truth in
that statement. Time is something that God created for the physical cosmos
in which we live.

The creation itself and the things man is dependent on--oil, water, coal,
iron, soil, chemical cycles, and the like--were not produced by human methods.
The fundamentalists want to restrict God to a short period of time, and
the promoters of naturalism want to restrict God to a long period of time.
There is nothing wrong with having an opinion on this subject, but the fact
is that the Bible does not tell us what time element God chose to use. The
biblical week of
Genesis 1
is undated and describes only a few things. We tend to view God's creative
process as a construction job, operated as we would build a building. The
more physics studies the evidence of how the cosmos came into being, the more
obvious it is that the creation was nothing like what man can do, nor is
it anything like we can imagine.

We also see our humanization of God when we approach our physical lives
and the problems we encounter in life. The book of Job makes it clear to
us that our lives are a part of a war between good and evil.
Ephesians 6:12
summarizes this marvelously when it says:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against
spiritual wickedness in high places

God's focus in the affairs of this life is on the wrestling described
in this passage. This battle is not limited to a human lifetime, and its
implications extend far beyond our physical deaths. When we want God to
punish those who wrong us, we are asking for a human response to our own
personal pain.
Jude 6-10
; Romans 12:19
; Luke 21:22
, and the whole book of Revelation all tell us that everything that happens
is seen by God as having an eternal purpose. We attempt to limit God when
we try to demand that He function in our lives as we want Him to.

May I emphasize that as I write this, I make no pretense to understand
it all. If I could, then God would in fact be human. It has been said,
"If I can understand the mind of God, then God isn't God." The practical
part of this, however, is that if we understand that God is not human and
that our purpose in existing is not a human purpose, then many of our problems
in understanding life are reduced, if not solved. Death in this life is
not the ultimate tragedy. God's purposes look far beyond what we can see,
and what is best is frequently beyond our reach mentally or visually. As
Ethel Louise Richmond, a friend of ours, likes to say, "If it isn't of eternal
significance, forget it."